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Saturday, April 13, 2013

Learning to Program

I have lately taken up a concerted effort to remind myself how to program. While I am not foreign to the task of programming, once I completed my minor in computer science, I more or less hung up my keyboard ( figuratively) in an effort to focus on mathematics. I rather regret that, as I really enjoyed programming when I cared about what I was actually programming.

For those of you looking to refresh your skills, or learn to program from scratch, I have a few interesting sites that are great fun resources. These are Code Academy and Project Euler.

Code Academy is constantly adding more and more languages and tutorials to their offerings, making it more and more indispensable, but it already has HTML, Javascript, Python, Ruby, and several others. It focuses more on web based programming but the skills it teaches are useful in most areas, once you learn the given syntax and work through the tracks. They have an interesting rewards and badge system, which I dare say seems way to easy to get badges. I have not done much I would consider of note on there yet, and I already seem heavily decorated.

Project Euler needs you to be familiar with programming and after the first few projects be a fairly good programmer. It is not a teaching material, but rather it is a series of problems that are supposed to test you programming abilities to work through complex problems that could not be worked out by hand in any reasonable amount of time, but a decently coded program should be able to find the answer in under a minute of computation time.

While I am sure there are many many other valuable sites, these are the ones I am currently spending my time on, and enjoying greatly. Do my readers have any suggestions?